Comic Report #54.2 - Almost There (Patreon)

This week I finally have a comic progress shot for you.  My life's been upside-down moving house the past few updates but I've been plugging away at the comic when I can so I thank you sincerely for your patience.    After typing up this article I'll be getting right back to work, and I expect to have this comic finished before Sunday rolls around- I'm excited to get it posted because I have a few cool things I want to work on once it's done, including setting up the page that follows, so I'll jump right into it!

Normally when I paint a page I'll start from the first panel and move straight to the last one, but for this page I've been skipping the top middle panel I had planned to animate.  Because I'd been picking away at this page around my moving obligations I tried to keep the workload light in the little pockets of time I had, so I skipped over the big complicated affair so I didn't have to stress out between my other tasks, and now that I'm nearing the end of the comic it's about time to sit down and figure out how to execute that panel.  I'll take care of that once I got the last panel blocked in to my 80% detail standard, though.  It's important to set goals and pace yourself, after all.

This page is mostly impact shots, so to keep it from looking homogeneous I wanted to try to capture the different impacts in different ways.  For the shot with Blood Goggles tackling Lizzie I opted not to use speed lines or the starburst background I'm fond of since I felt like I use that a lot, and used it in previous pages too much, so I wanted to try a kind of dust cloud with a bright white focal point at the area of impact instead.  

One of my art quirks is I don't really like covering up the character art in a panel.  When I write text I'll often go out of my way to thesaurus my word bubbles to fit in the space around characters so I don't need to overlap them, so when I want to draw the big energy lines of Blood Goggles pummeling Lizzie I didn't want to have them covering up the front of the action.  I'd thought about how the impact just being entirely backdropped would work out and I feel like it does what I want it to in a way that satisfies my brain.  

Moving down to the gunshot panel, I wanted this shot to be extremely high-contrast, using lighting on the characters' bodies to draw the eye to the point of the report where all the sound is coming from.  When I originally blocked this panel in I had a white muzzle flash with an intense dark around it to help it pop more and had that fading outwards to lighter edges at the far sides of the panel.  Since the rest of the panels were dark background by default this ended up not conveying the effect I wanted to, so I tried inverting my colors and that honestly helped a lot.  Having the white background gradient as the center point and then overlapping a black muzzle flash on top of it felt way more ear-splitting than the way I had it before.  I'd experimented with inverting the values on Lizzie and Blood Goggles as well but it didn't look right, the lighting on their bodies was too descriptive in the way I painted it to work inverted, so I'm leaving them how they are.  I wouldn't have thought to make a flash of light "black" but looking back on it now my goal is to convey the impact of the sound, not the force of the weapon discharging, so blacking out the fire to emphasize the waves behind it was the right move, and it's a new trick to keep in my pocket for future use.

I wanted the reeling panel to really stand out, to capture the ear-ringing, disorienting buzz of having a loud sound go off right next to your head.  To achieve this effect I used a Photoshop noise filter to turn a panel of grey into static grain, and then I made it transparent so I can paint light and dark values on the layer beneath it, making sure the static around Blood Goggles' head was light enough to have a bit of contrast to it, to draw the eye to the focal point of the panel.  I also selected my outline and paint layers and made a duplicate of the static layer to overlay on top of my lineart, like a paper cut-out of my static filter layer set to the exact dimensions of Blood Goggles and Lizzie.  Then, to emphasize that it's Blood Goggles' ears ringing with static, I used a soft-edge brush to erase the static overtop of Lizzie, pulling her a bit more into the foreground and out of the haze of static.  I probably need to pull some horizontal lines out of the light background around Blood Goggles' head to kinda emphasize a line through her ears, but for now I'm happy with the effect on this panel.

The last big impact effect is the THOK shot of Lizzie clocking Blood Goggles with her pistol.  The effect itself is pretty basic, it's just the same as the pummeling shots above it.  The big smear is definitely inspired by my work animating sprites for our game, that's basically how I've been drawing attack animations, so a bit of that has bled back into my comic work.  

I'm close to done with this page so I'm going to get back to work on it, but I wanted to share it with you after a few rocky weeks of personal life things.  Thank you, as always, for your kind patience and support of our work.  I'll have a final textless page ready to share with you soon!